Small scale liquid chromatography systems exist which generally comprise a number of chromatography process components interconnected by capillary tubes. The functionality of the systems can be improved by including valves for switching flows between components, or for switching flows to clean the system when an experiment or small scale process has been completed. Cleaning of the valves and multiple capillaries used can be particularly time consuming because every valve position and tube needs to be subjected to cleaning for thorough cleaning. When hazardous materials are used, such a cleaning process can be extremely time consuming. The inventor has realised that a disposable fluid path network could be employed to reduce cleaning time and/or make cleaning less hazardous where hazardous fluids are processed. However, this is not a straight forward step, because conventionally, expensive chromatography components are used, interconnected by lower cost tubes, so merely despising of the tubes does not save any cleaning time, because the internal fluid paths of the components needs to be cleaned also. As well as that, to be versatile, the fluid path system needs to be easily reconfigurable, so that different experimental set-ups can be made quickly.
The inventor has devised a way to make the valve components of the chromatography system and the interconnecting fluid path network suitably low cost to make them disposable, whilst simplifying the fluid paths of the remaining components so that they can be cleaned easily, either when connected to the disposable fluid path network, or afterwards. The inventor has also devised a fluid path system which is simple to reconfigure.